In the face of stiff competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX, Adobe’s Flash technology seems to be making all the right moves.
Adobe has given us the tools to make Flash dance (I haven’t used those two words together since the eighties) in new and interesting ways.

In particular, Flex 3 and ActionScript 3 have made it possible for we programming geeks to create visually rich internet applications using a strongly typed, object oriented programming language and a decent markup language. And the AIR runtime engine has enabled us to extend these type of applications to the desktop using the same programming languages and skill sets.

Now that Flex 3 is open sourced I expect we’ll see even more progress in terms of documentation and API’s in Flex 4 (code named Gumbo).

But this isn’t meant to be cheerleading camp. So here’s my hint of the day for flex developers wanting to create RIA applications. Both Cairngorm and PureMVC are strong frameworks for creating Model/View/Controller applications in Flex and Actionscript. But if you are creating something relatively simple, both of these frameworks can add unnecessary complexity and overhead to your application.

For a simpler application, I highly recommend Tom Bray’s EasyMVC recipe (unfortunately you have to log into Adobe to view his screencast). Just to keep you confused, there is a second actionscript framework calling itself EasyMVC written by Simeon Bateman. I prefer Tom Bray’s explanation and approach. He refers to his EasyMVC as a recipe. There are no source code files to download, only a explained methodology for how to structure a well organized application. It’s also a nice primer for Cairngorm development for anyone interested in learning more about that framework.

- Dan Fox, VP of Technology